Letter from Birmingham Jail
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The Letter from Birmingham Jail or Letter from Birmingham City Jail, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., an American civil rights leader. King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham's city government and downtown retailers.
King's letter is a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen on April 12, 1963, titled "A Call For Unity". The clergymen agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not in the streets. King responded that without nonviolent forceful direct actions such as his, true civil rights could never be achieved. As he put it, "This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'" He asserted that not only was civil disobedience justified in the face of unjust laws, but that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
Extensive excerpts from the letter were published, without Dr. King's consent, on May 19, 1963 in the New York Post Sunday Magazine. [1] The letter was first published as "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in the June 12, 1963, edition of The Christian Century,[2] and in the June 24, 1963, issue of The New Leader. It was reprinted shortly thereafter in The Atlantic Monthly. King included the full text in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait.
The letter includes the famous statement "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," as well as the words attributed to William E. Gladstone quoted by King: "[J]ustice too long delayed is justice denied."
[edit] Citations
- "In any nonviolent campaign, there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustice exists; negotiations; self-purification; and direct action."
- "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."
- "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all'."
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Letter from a Birmingham Jail |
- Letter from Birmingham Jail full text
- Letter from Birmingham Jail pdf format
- "Statement by Alabama Clergymen", referred to above as "Call for Unity"
- Letter from Birmingham Jail article at BhamWiki.com
- Letter from Birmingham Jail article, Encyclopedia of Alabama
